Archive for the 'Friends' Category

2 Degrees of Freedom from Ralph Nader

Last night I was half-watching a PBS Independent Lens program on Ralph Nader (“An Unreasonable Man“), when the program showed one of his first aides, or Nader’s Raiders as they were called, Gary Sellers. I thought to myself, that man looks remarkably like a Gary Sellers I once knew 25 or so years ago.

That Gary Sellers, though I had heard tales that he was a Washington Lawyer (which I frankly didn’t believe), lived in a tiny trailer up on Knobley Mountain in Short Gap, WV. The trailer was in the middle of a cherry and apple orchard on the top of a hillside of a beautiful piece of property that overlooked the farms and rivers of the northern Potomac Highlands near Fort Ashby, WV. On a clear day from up there, you could see for 40 miles. It really was a lovely piece of land except that you had to drive by some sort of deep gravel pit on the way in and an oft-used coal mining road ran through the middle of the orchard (probably some of the reasons why he left in the late 1980s – and like many such places of beauty, this orchard is now a McMansion farm).

Gary used to make friends by bartering his cherries for goods and services in town. Which is how my family met him, when my step-father traded some car work for a “day pass” to the orchard. This barter-system became a way of life for our family for many years and Gary became a family friend. And if Gary didn’t need to barter in order to obtain life’s essentials, I knew no different. For indeed, he seemed to live simply enough to me. As far as I knew, his only possessions were whatever old, deteriorating car he happened to own at any given point and a small camper that sat among the overgrown weeds and fruit trees of his hillside orchard.

In fact, had I not just potentially learned that he was once a lead assistant to Ralph Nader during Nader’s most productive period and afterward was indeed an active and diligent Washington lawyer as was always rumored, I would have continued to think of him as basically an aging hippie – perhaps a Timothy Leary who happened to like black cherries instead of LSD. Furthering this belief, was the fact that Gary did not seem to be bothered by the basic concerns of life, such as money and transportation. He drove what might once have been considered cars but had become broken-down wrecks. And the fact they he could not be bothered by such mundane details as obtaining reliable transportation led to many misadventures (and sometimes even the need to borrow cash).

In Memorium

Pre-Google, I might have never been able to confirm who this televised Washington lawyer Gary Sellers was and probably would have chalked it all up to coincidence. But I did look up this Gary Sellers, the Washington Lawyer, the one-time Nader ally and later Nader critic, champion of worker safety and openness in government, and indeed he was that Gary Sellers, the aging hippie and jalopy-driving cherry-monger living off the land. Sadly, I learned this fact by reading his obituary in the Washington Post. I was saddened to learn that he died last March, as way too many Americans still do (even with Nader’s safety efforts), in a car accident.

Though I was only in my early teens, Gary always treated me well and in a way that teens respect and appreciate – like we were peers or friends. He had a genuineness that kids are very keen at detecting (but are forced to turn off this filter later in life so we can later cope with the generally phoniness of the world). To be sure, he was definitely an eccentric (as evidenced by the many light-hearted stories that are associated with him), but he was also exceedingly friendly and giving – in a word, the perfect aging hippie (albeit one with a secret alter-ego as a Washington lawyer).

What better testament to a man is there than to be fondly remembered by all who knew him and to know that he left the world a better place (as he most certainly did through both orchard planting and safety regulations)? With his work here now done, may he now be able to spend eternity tending to his black cherry trees on a beautiful hillside on the other side of heaven.